SOCIAL SKILLS VIA EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: LANGUAGE LEARNING

10th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference - SGEM2010, www.sgem.org, SGEM2010 Conference Proceedings/ ISBN 10: 954-91818-1-2, June 20-26, 2010, Vol. 2, 1089-1094 pp

ABSTRACT

The aim of this essay to draw an outline of the effect of various types of intelligence ,
paying particular attention to the concept of so called “Emotional Intelligence” with a
language teacher’s perspective. Throughout the essay it is aimed to create an awareness
of different intelligence capacity of each individual learner in an ideal language teaching
environment.

While doing this literature on the area has been scanned and case studies have been
performed on learners of various cultural and geographical backgrounds.

In literature, many quantitative findings indicate that there is a significant relationship
between academic achievement and emotional intelligence skills. The importance of
understanding Emotional intelligence (EI) skills and social intelligence (SI) has
gravitated form the business management to training activities. This study aimed at
exploring the impact of social intelligence and emotional intelligence on the language
learning. To this end, a research has been conducted on the students of vocational
school (n=280) of two private vocational schools in Istanbul. In the research,
participants emotional intelligence was assessed by the Emotional Competence
Inventory (ECI, 2nd Version) developed by Boyatzis and Goleman and the Resilience
Scale for Adults (RSA-scale) proposed by Hjemdal, Friborg, Martinussen, and
Rosenvinge. According to the results, a strong relationship was revealed among
emotional intelligence, social intelligence and language learning.

Keywords: Social Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Language Learning